Austin, Mary Hunter

Mary Austin By courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe (1868-1934), novelist, short-story writer, and playwright Born on September 9, 1868, in Carlinville, Illinois, Mary Hunter graduated from Blackburn College in 1888 and soon afterward moved with her family to Bakersfield, California. She married Stafford W. Austin in 1891, and for several years they lived in various towns in California's Owens Valley. Austin soon learned to love the desert and the Native Americans who lived in it, and both figured in the sketches that comprised her first book, The Land of Little Rain (1903), which was a great and immediate success. It was followed by a collection of stories, The Basket Woman (1904), a romantic novel, Isidro (1905), and a collection of regional sketches, The Flock (1906). In 1905 she separated from her husband and moved to Carmel, California. She later traveled to Italy, France, and England, where meeting H.G. Wells and other intellectuals strengthened her feminist ideas and added a deep commitment to socialism to her own deeply personal and sustaining form of mysticism. Returning to New York City, she became associated with John Reed, Walter Lippmann, and others of the group of writers and artists whose center was Mabel Dodge Luhan. A play, The Arrow Maker (1911), and her best novel

13. Mary Austin Mary Austin, links to information and all texts available on the web, information Mary Hunter Austin (18681934) American Literature Sites Photograph is courtesy of this site.) Mary Austin'shttp://guweb2.gonzaga.edu/faculty/campbell/enl311/austin.htm

14. Mary Austin Mary Hunter Austin (18681934). American Literature Sites Foley Library Catalog The Land of Little Rain Site created by the students in Prof.http://guweb2.gonzaga.edu/faculty/campbell/enl311/austin.htm&e=42